ELEMENTS: Adam Štěch’s Perspective on Architectural Details

The exhibition ELEMENTS celebrates architecture, design and the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total work of art—revealing hitherto unexplored aspects of the applied arts.

Architecture historian and researcher Adam Štěch has selected thousands of his own photographs, generating an atlas of architectural and interior details created by architects and designers as part of their artistic concepts for building designs.

The exhibition presents these details both as aspects of architecture and as objects of unique artistic value designed for specific places and purposes. The selection of lighting, seating, storage spaces, tables, railings, doors, handles, windows, floors, walls and other decorative or functional elements celebrates the Modernist idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk and records the range of skills practised by modernist architects from Art Nouveau to Modernism and beyond.

The aim of this project is to create the biggest database of one-of-a-kind designs from specific buildings and interiors captured by a single person and to survey previously unexplored chapters in the history of applied art.